Posted on 07 August 2012

If you want to make some money online from home, there are quite a few opportunities out there for you to take advantage of. However, you need to be careful when selecting the best online business opportunity for you. There are plenty of programs that are perfectly legitimate, but you need to watch out for some which make exaggerated claims of potential earnings and misstate the true nature of the business that you will be involved in. Here are a few more things that you should be careful of when you search for online earning opportunities.

Freelance work programs

You will find a few websites that claim to offer you access to exclusive opportunities to find freelance work, as well as promise to give you highly valuable information on how to succeed as a freelancer. They often claim that it will be easy to find work and that you can earn a full time income from freelancing online right from the start.

It is definitely possible to make a living online from freelancing. Even a full time income, depending on the projects that you find and your skills. But there are no “secret databases” of freelancing opportunities. Freelance jobs, such as transcription work, article writing, programming, translation, graphic design and more can be found for free on various sites, without you needing to join a membership site and pay anywhere from $30 to $100 a month for this privilege. Just take a look at sites such as ODesk, elance and more.

As for tips and advice on how to increase your earnings, these can be found for free just by searching for information on blogs and forums. All that these sites do is to collect information from other sites and then charge you to read the same things you can find for free if only you spend a few minutes doing some research.

Day trading / forex

You will also find sites which claim you can make money from the markets by day trading stocks or participating in the foreign exchange (forex) market. Again, it is possible to make money this way and many people have been highly successful with it. But it is simply not as easy as a lot of sellers of guides and systems tell you. First, you will need to have access to a significant amount of risk capital if you want a shot at making more than just a few dollars a day. Then, you will also need to gain an understanding of how markets work and how you can profit from them. There are no magical systems which allow you to make guaranteed profits from the markets. Otherwise, everyone could become a millionaire in just a few weeks. Remember that while you can make money, there is also the very real possibility of losing money, especially in the beginning.

If you want to try out some strategies or systems, it is best to practice for a few weeks with play money first before you invest real funds. This will give you an idea as to whether this type of work is right for you.

Posted on 10 July 2012

Now that you’ve decided to create a mobile friendly website, let’s look at some of the options available to you as a webmaster:

Using a Content Management System (CMS)

Most business websites today run on a database driven content management system, with the most popular options being WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. These systems are the most popular choices, as they are free and open source. This means they’re also highly customizable, with different plugins and themes available that can help you make a mobile website.

WordPress is known to be the easiest system to work with. You simply install it on your web hosting account, pick a theme that you like and then go on to customize your site by adding images, photos, as well as the content, which could be text, video, etc. While it’s widely seen as a blogging platform, it’s not just for blogs. Once you get your site built, you can use the WPTouch plugin, which will turn your existing WordPress website into a fully mobile compatible site. The plugin is relatively easy to use and includes full documentation on its features.

For those who are using Joomla instead, there is the Joomla Mobile Extension which works in the same way. A similar story for Drupal, which has the Drupal Mobile Plugin. It changes the way a website is displayed when accessed from a mobile device.

Using Static HTML Pages

Unless you want a small site that isn’t updated frequently and that doesn’t have user interactive features (comments, ratings, etc.) using a static HTML website instead of a CMS isn’t really recommended. Creating mobile websites without a CMS will usually require some knowledge of web design concepts and HTML. If this is your choice, there are some tools which can simplify the process and limit the need to manually code pages. Some are free, such as the Gridless tool which incorporates elements of mobile website design into an easy to use template. Other, more powerful programs exist. They can range in price from $0 to over $200.

Using a Free Hosted Website Solution

While this is usually not recommended for larger businesses and sites, it’s possible to create a simple mobile site using a free hosting provider. You can of course, purchase your own domain name and redirect it to the site in the majority of cases.

Tumblr is a choice to look for. While it’s more off a social blogging platform rather than a business tool, there are quite a few small business websites based on Tumblr. There is a Tumblr Mobile Theme now available that can be enabled in the Advanced theme options of the theme customization panel.

Google Sites also has a mobile site design option. You just select a template, make a few customizations such as the colors, then add the text and additional content you want displayed on your site. Google Sites now has an option specifically made for mobile site design, which many small business owners use.

But what if you already have a website and want to make a mobile version of it? We will take a look at your options for that tomorrow.

Posted on 15 March 2012

There are many out there who have seen successful blogs that receive tens of thousands of hits each day and have a loyal following of readers from all around the world. It is definitely possible to start a blog and have it become popular, but there are a few considerations that webmasters would need to keep in mind in order to put all the chances of succeeding on their side.

When getting started, you should do certain things which will help you get off on the right foot. Here are some of the most important elements to think about:

Get Your Own Domain and Hosting

You will find many services, such as Blogger, WordPress.com and other blog hosts which let you host a blog for free, as a subdomain of their main domain name. If you hope your blog to be successful and earn you some money, then you should avoid any free hosting service. First, it will make promoting your blog more complicated, as you wouldn’t be hosting it on your own domain name. Plus, there is the fact that free blogging platform often provide a limited set of tools and can have several other restrictions that will make customizing your blog and monetizing it more difficult. While you may find a few highly popular blogs that are hosted on a free service, this is the exception and not the norm. Also, in many cases these blogs have become popular simply by accident as their content went viral, rather than through the actions of the owner.

Basic web hosting is cheap and can cost less than $5 per month. A domain name can also be purchased for less than $10 and is included in many hosting packages. Once you have your hosting, you can then install a blogging platform, such as WordPress, which is the most popular in the world among bloggers.

Think About the Content You Will Provide to Readers

While you may have an objective of making money from your blog, you must remember that your primary mission should be to provide content that your audience will love and find useful. There are so many spammy blogs that are contain nothing more than advertisements for products that the webmaster owns or is an affiliate of, or blogs that contain copied or rewritten content that offers nothing new to the reader, where the webmaster simply hopes that visitors will click on some of the ads.

Before you choose a niche for your blog, ask yourself whether it’s something that you truly have an interest in and will really be able to create useful content for on a regular basis. Also, ask yourself whether it’s something that will be relatively unique, or if there would already be thousands of other blogs just like yours online. The more likely your blog is to appeal to its intended audience, the more natural traffic you will get, which will make generating revenue from your blog a lost faster and demand much less active effort on your part.

Posted on 27 February 2012

Many webmasters are looking for ways to get an increased amount of links to their site. Link building strategies are often discussed in webmaster circles and are nothing really new. However, for those who are new to link building, here are some excellent ways to get high quality backlinks that search engines like Google will love. By using some of them you can increase the amount of one way backlinks that your site receives, helping you with SEO and potentially getting you some traffic directly from other sites as well.

Make guest posts

By guest posting on other blogs, you will get the opportunity to get a link back to your website in exchange for providing content to the owner of the blog. There are plenty of blog owners who would love to get some original articles posted to their blog on a regular basis and one way that they do this if they don’t want to pay someone else to write them is to invite guest blogger to make the posts for them in exchange for a backlink.

Write a press release and get it syndicated

A press release could be an article which talks about something new that is happening in your niche, such as a survey, poll or analysis that you’ve done. By submitting your press release to syndication sites such as PR Web, you could get some good backlinks and also some traffic coming in from the press release itself.

Write articles and get them syndicated

There are a lot of good quality article directories out there where you can submit an article with a backlink to your website. Some, such as Idea Marketers, allow syndication, which means that your article, including the resource box that has the link to your website, can be republished on other sites, blogs or directories. This means you will get the opportunity to get even more backlinks to your website, in addition to having the content that you’ve written seen by more people than before.

Use online classified ad sites

Free online classified ad sites such as Gumtree are often used by marketers for various reasons. While they may not work for all types of businesses, they can still be a good choice, especially if your site is selling something or providing a service. Not only will you be able to get some traffic coming directly from the classified site, but also you can get some backlinks to it by including your website link in the ad. For some ad categories, classified ads sites also rank quite high in search engine results.

Offer to do reviews and testimonials

Many companies would love to get a testimonial or positive review from you on their website. This is because it can increase their conversion rates quite well. Simply ask if you can also include a link to your website with your testimonial.

Posted on 15 February 2012

When you want to create an info product, one of the important things to think about is what exactly your product will be based on. This is the part where you will do your research on your niche and try to find one that will be right.

A good niche is one which has people interested in paying for a product that will solve a problem and answer their questions, but is specific enough to not be too saturated with other products. So for example, instead of a general product about “affiliate marketing”, you could create an info product about “Using Twitter for Affiliate Marketing”, etc.

Doing niche research will take a bit of time to complete, but it’s not a complicated task. You can use Google’s keyword tool to see search volumes and competition levels for specific keywords that are related to your niche. You can also read Yahoo Answers, blogs and discussion forums to find out the type of questions that people are asking the most often about your general niche and see if there’s a more specific, sub niche that you can exploit from that.

Also, doing niche research involves looking at the competition. Are there any other info products which target the specific niche that you are after? If so, what do they claim they offer and how much do these products cost? What can you do to make your product better than competitors and thus more appealing to buyers? These are all valid questions that you would need to ask yourself when you’re in the niche selection phase of product creation. Remember, a successful product will often be one that offers something more and actually stands out from the crowd, rather than simply being the same thing that has been done dozens of times, just under a different name.

Now that you have thought about and selected your specific niche, it is time to consider the content that you will put in your product. There are many different ways that you can deliver the content, such as in the format of an ebook, videos, interactive tutorials, audio guides, etc. Sure, some formats might be better in certain niches, but the actual content of your product is the most important part, regardless of how you will be delivering it to the buyer.

Obviously, when creating a product, having some solid knowledge and experience in the niche of your product will help out a lot. You will already have an idea of what you will want to include in your product and how you will structure the information contained in your future product. This is why it’s also recommended that you select a niche that you actually have an interest in, as it will make creating the content a lot easier and less time consuming for you. Tomorrow we will explore some further ideas on how you can put together a product that will be genuinely useful for your buyers and will have a higher chance of getting a positive reception.

Posted on 06 December 2011

It’s not a big secret that when you’re building a website, if you want to get it to rank well in search engines, then some SEO work is in order. This makes plenty of webmasters do their research on various websites, blogs, forums, etc. dedicated to the topic of search engine optimization. Getting information on the topic is of course the way to go and just like with anything, knowledge is power. So the more you know, the more you will actually be able to apply in a practical context on your website. But when you research information, it’s very important that the SEO tips that you read are actually good information and not some of the myths and misconceptions that keep re appearing on many sites. These actually cause webmasters to make mistakes when it comes to SEO and often make them waste time focusing on things that aren’t important.

The issue of wasting time is definitely one to consider for any webmaster. If you’re working on your site, or on your websites by yourself, then in many cases you only have a few hours a day to make things happen. You definitely don’t want to spend that time doing things that won’t matter and won’t help you achieve your goals as far as search engine rankings will go. Instead, you could be focusing on improving the content of your website or actually using SEO techniques that will work.

There’s also one big problem when it comes to bad SEO advice. If you apply the wrong SEO techniques to your website, this could end up actually hurting your chances of gaining a good position in search engine results rather than helping you. Now if you’re just making this mistake on one of your mini sites and you have 50 more of them, it may not be such a big deal, as you can start all over again. But if this is your main business website we’re talking about, then this would be even more problematic.

So the question is, how do you avoid making mistakes in SEO? The first thing would be to look for quality information. This can come from well reputed sources, such as websites and blogs of SEO experts. If you take advice from a forum or any other website where user generated content is posted, then first evaluate what’s being said and whether other members agree with it or not.

Avoid Black Hat SEO techniques. These are methods that take advantage of loopholes in search engines systems and are mainly designed with the hope of rapidly getting a website to go up on a search engine, even though it wouldn’t normally “deserve” to get to that position. Using such methods will rapidly get your website penalized as search engines catch on to them and close the loopholes that were used. If you want to build a good reputation online for your site, you should seek out techniques that allow legitimate and long term growth, not tricks to try to get ahead too quickly.

Posted on 30 November 2011

Previously, we’ve seen a few tips that would help you build a blog that you can use for online marketing. While deciding on the kind of content you will have on your blog, choosing a good hosting provider and monetizing your blog are important things to consider, there are also a few other tips you should keep in mind if you want your new blog to be a great tool that will help you make more money online. Here are some more of them:

Choose a Good Theme

When you create a blog by using a system such as WordPress or Joomla, you get thousands of options when it comes to themes for your new blog. A theme is basically an overall design, sort of like a template, that will determine the look and feel of your blog. Choosing a theme is relatively easy, as when you look through WordPress or Joomla, you will see thousands of free themes, as well as some paid ones that you can instantly apply to your blog. However, this is not something that you will want to rush into. It’s better for you to look carefully at all the designs available and select one that will work well for you.

The theme that you use will need to match well with your business and should be similar in appearance to your main website. Don’t hesitate to ask colleagues for advice on which theme will be better for you.

If you have some graphics and programming knowledge, you can design your own blog theme, or edit an existing one to make it match your needs better. You can also pay someone to make a custom made theme just for your blog, however the services of a professional theme designer could cost several hundreds of dollars.

Make Sure Your Blog is Inviting to the User and Easy to Navigate

One of the most common complaints that blog readers have is that the blogs seem to be filled with ads, opt in boxes and other monetization options, so much that it is difficult to actually see what link will lead them to an actual content page and which one is an ad. Of course, it’s important for you to make money from your blog and this is probably one of your primary objectives. But remember that the first purpose of the blog is a communication tool that you use to convey information to your visitors. Therefore, it needs to be easy to navigate for the user.

To determine whether you’re doing things right, create your blog and install your theme, make any customizations necessary and add a few test posts. Then show the result to some people to see whether they like it or not. Get some input on what they think should be changed or improved on your new blog. This will allow you to make some changes before you officially launch your blog.

Posted on 16 November 2011

Article marketing can be a very useful way of advertising your website, by including your articles in various directories and having them posted on other people’s blogs with links to your website. Of course, articles can also serve as blog posts for your own blog as well. Now many people are reluctant to use article marketing because they feel that they’re not good writers. But the reality is, the majority of online content is written at about a 9th grade level, so you definitely do not need to have the skills of J.R.R. Tolkien or William Shakespeare if you want to write some web articles. Here are a few tips that you can employ to quickly write excellent and informative articles.

Plan Your Writing

Before you begin writing your article, you will need to plan it well. Think of the title, the introduction, as well as the structure of the article. The structure includes your main article body’s talking points, which is the core of the information that you will be presenting. Then think of the conclusion and call to action, if any, that you will be using in your article. Think if you will need to look up or research some information and what specific information that would be. It is a good idea to open your resources before you start even writing the article.

Write In a Structured, Logical Way

Normally, an article will have an introduction that will describe the topic, some well defined talking points in the body and a conclusion. If you are presenting different kinds of information, such as showing the different advantages of a product, it is better to neatly regroup that information into paragraphs with subheaders then to have information that is all over the place. Also, avoid repeating something that you’ve already said several times within the article. Chances are, your readers have already understood it the first and second times.

Think of Your Audience

When writing, think of the person that will be reading your article, as it will be a human and not a robot that will be reading it. What are likely to be that person’s interests, as well as their level of understanding of the material that you are presenting? This will help you write content that will be well suited for your audience. For example, if you have a blog that explains the basics of using a computer to those that are using one for the first time, it’s not a good idea to post articles about the different networking protocols and the details about how encryption algorithms work during an SSL session.

Include Links to Internal and External Content

Obviously, you would include links to products that you are promoting. But if you post the article on your own site, make sure you include links to the relevant internal pages, especially if you reference some thing that you talk about in another article on your website.

Posted on 01 September 2011

Some websites are more designed for visitors to only visit the site once to make a purchase. After that, there is really no more reasons for the user to visit the site again. This is usually the case when it comes to eBook sales pages or landing pages for CPA offers. However, there are many other types of websites where you would want the user to come back often. This includes e-commerce sites, as well as many other sites that do not directly sell anything, but are there to provide content to the user, such as informational blogs or “arcade” type sites that provide flash games. Usually the webmaster profits from these sites by including CPA advertising banners or pay per click ads on their site. Now one question that webmasters often ask is: how do I make my visitors come back? There are a few ways you can accomplish this. Here are some of the most important ones:

First, provide useful content

Obviously, for a user to come back later, they must have enjoyed the site and found it interesting. So your first responsibility would be to give your audience something that they are interested in, something that they would want to look at. Also, make sure that the content that you put on your site is of high quality. So if you have an informational blog on a certain topic, make sure that the posts would actually make someone learn something, are well written and well presented. Nobody wants to read a blog that is filled with poor grammar, contains tons of information that is just copied from other places on the internet and stuffed with keywords.

Update your content regularly

Having a site that looks “dead” will not do much to bring back visitors. If a visitor sees that the last update that you have made to your site was several months ago, they will not be too inclined to come back, thinking that the website has been abandoned and will not be updated. As such, it is very important that you add fresh and new content to your website on a regular basis. If you have an e-commerce site, feature some different products on your home page every once in a while. Or better yet, offer some special promotions on some merchandise and advertise this on the main page of your site. Put in some news about upcoming products or promotions. If the user knows that you will be adding new things to your website in the future, they will be more likely to book mark the site and will come back later on to check out the new things that you have added.

These are all basic things that you can do to increase visitor loyalty. Tomorrow we will explore some additional items that you can add to your site to increase repeat visits and potentially make more profit from your website’s returning visitors.

Posted on 18 August 2011

Many small business owners have one main website which contains information about their company and their products. Sometimes it is an e-commerce site where customers can make purchases directly through the site. Obviously, having a website is useful, but what about a blog? Including a blog has many benefits. In fact, some online marketing studies have shown that sites which incorporate a blog get more traffic than a site without one. After all, who doesn’t want to attract more visitors to their website?

Besides the increased traffic, blogs can have many additional benefits for your site. Here are some of them:

They can increase your search engine ranking

Search engines such as Google love high quality blogs and having one on your site can do wonders to increase your search engine ranking. It can also provide you with useful backlinks back to your main site as well as relevant parts of it, such as product descriptions.

They can establish you as an authority in your niche

The purpose of a blog for a business is not really to sell anything, but rather to show you as an authority in your niche by providing content which your readers will find useful. You can give information about how to best use your products, news about your industry, as well as any advice or tips that your readers will appreciate.

Blogs give you another place to interact with your visitors

When you post articles on your blog, you can allow readers to leave comments. This is a great way to get feedback about your blog and your business. It is also an excellent way to answer questions that a customer might have about a certain product. Blog comments give your visitor an easy way to get in touch with you should they be interested in something that you offer, but might not be ready to buy it just yet. Of course, with blog comments there is always the issue of comment spam. However, there are various WordPress plugins that you can use to limit the amount of spam comments that you get. Of course, you can always approve each comment manually, thus eliminating most of the spam. Putting a notice that comments are moderated and approved manually will also serve to deter spammers.

Getting the Most out of Your Blog

To get the most out of a blog, it needs to be updated on a regular basis with fresh new content. This will not only help you when it comes to SEO, but will also be very useful at keeping your readers interested. After all, nobody wants to read a blog that seems “dead” and hasn’t had an update in several months. A good thing about blogs is that you can now include multimedia content such as video on them as well, so if you have a video that you would like to share with your readers, you can put it up on your blog as well.

Posted on 04 July 2011

If you want to make some money online by promoting affiliate offers, then there are various ways for you to accomplish this. You could building landing pages for each offer you push, or even link directly to the offer depending on which advertising channel you use. But one of the ways to push affiliate offers online is by simply creating a blog.

Blogs have many advantages. They make it very easy to add unique and new content, which will help them remain interesting with readers and also make SEO easier. With blogging platforms such as Joomla and WordPress, creating your own blog has never been easier. So how do you make one for affiliate marketing? Here is an example scenario:

Let’s say that you are promoting web hosting affiliate offers. The main topic of your blog will be web hosting, or issues that are of interest to other internet marketers or webmasters. You would make regular posts such as: web building tips, reviews of particular web hosts, comparisons between different types of web hosting, SEO advice, etc. Basically, anything that is related to being a webmaster.

There will be various ways for you to “plug” the affiliate ads into your blog. You can, of course use classic banner ads, or text ads placed in prominent locations. But it is also possible for you to include affiliate links inside the text of your blog. For example, you could link the name of a web host that you talk about in a blog post to the affiliate offer.

But one important thing to remember when you are creating a blog for affiliate marketing is to not make it look like this is the only purpose of your blog. Sure, for you the main objective of your blog would be to generate money for you. But your readers come to your blog in order to be informed about something they care about, not simply read post after post that is singing praises of various different companies and products.

So back to our example of a web hosting blog. Sure, it is fine to have certain posts talk about how great a certain web host is, or that inform readers of a special promotion that a hosting company is having at this time. But you also need to include some informative content as well. So you could make some posts that talk about web design tools or posts that explain how VPS web hosting is different from shared hosting, etc. If your readers notice that your blog is nothing more than an advertising platform, chances are they won’t trust it very much. They will probably leave to go to another site and the chances that someone would click one of your ads and sign up for one of the web hosts that you are pushing are quite remote if your blog is structured that way. Basically, the key to success is having regularly updated and informative content.

Posted on 02 June 2011

Blogs are increasingly being used by businesses, who are making it an important part of their overall internet marketing strategy. Thus, blogs are not only a tool for individuals to share some information with their friends, but can also become a very effective business tool. Even though they can be effective for business, there are certain things that you need to keep in mind before you put together a blog with the goal of promotions your website or your business.

The primary advantage of using a blog is that it will serve to give your business some personality as well as originality. Unlike a website where the primary purpose is to sell the product or service that you are offering to the visitor, a blog gives you the chance to connect more with your visitors and provide them with some useful information about your line of business. So, let’s say that you own a web hosting company. In that case, you can make a blog and make posts about the various types of web hosting, the differences between them, providing web development and online advertising advice, etc.

This will give you the opportunity to better connect to your audience and not sound like you are trying to sell them things all the time. Your blog should also feature images, graphs and videos where applicable. Don’t choose a bland template as a design for your blog and simply make it a wall of text. Many readers would be turned off by this and even though the content may be very interesting, they will not be very inclined to read it if it is not presented in a good way to them.

Another important point that every webmaster needs to keep in consideration when building a business blog: don’t start a blog with the simple intention of advertising your products, services or websites. While you can include links to your website and your offerings, don’t make blog posts whose only purpose is to promote what you have without adding any real value for the reader.

The rise in popularity of affiliate marketing and CPA offers has had the effect of also increasing the number of fake blogs or “flogs”, which are websites that are designed to look like a normal blog, but where all the posts are actually thinly disguised advertising. If a user is web savvy, chances are they have seen such pages a few times before. So if you make your blog look too much like a flog, readers will assume that it is one and will simply move on to another site. Obviously this is not something that you want.

The best thing to do is to create a blog that is informative to the users, friendly and does not contain too much advertising material. Your site visitors will be more likely to find interest in it if the blog looks attractive to them and provides them with information that they find useful.

Posted on 19 February 2011

Anyone who is looking to launch a new product would do well to look into the many opportunities provided by new technologies and marketing avenues that the Internet offers. Tools and platforms such as Internet marketing and blogs have changed the face of marketing and promotion in numerous ways, and anyone who doesn’t utilize them is disregarding something that could spell the difference between a successful product and one that never manages to reach its market.

In spite of these new marketing aids however, there remain several marketing techniques that have served successful entrepreneurs well for decades. Sure, implementing these hi-tech methods is an essential component to any product launch, but it would be worthwhile to utilize the more traditional methods as well. Here than are five essential things to know before launching a product.

Focus on the needs of your customers
The first consideration is one that you will have to keep in mind throughout the duration of your product process. It is tremendously important to find out what your customers need and how to provide it to them. Customers are after all the lifeblood of any business, and keeping them happy will go a long way in ensuring the success of your product. Find out what your customers need and what motivates them to buy, and half your work is done.

Find out how your customers define “quality”
It is also important to get into the minds of your customers and figure out what makes a “quality” product from their perspective. Don’t simply assume that giving your customers what they ask for is enough. You also have to make sure that they are happy with what they are getting, and having a clear idea of what spells “quality” for them is one of the most effective ways to achieve those goals.

Implement quality procedures
Now that you know what makes for a “quality” product, you have to ensure your ability to produce it. Keep in mind that you can’t simply tack on “quality” at the end of the production process, and developing a quality product requires planning and consistency from the ground up. To this end, it would also be beneficial to implement quality checks throughout the production process in order to ensure the worth of your product.

Fine-tune your product
The quest for producing a “quality” product doesn’t end in the planning process either. You should also keep careful watch of every step of the production process, and make sure that standards of quality are maintained. Remember that the costs of revision or editing are negligible compared to the benefits that you will gain from a thoroughly satisfied market.

Get feedback
Finally, you will need to find out how your customers respond to your product and whether or not it meets with their expectations. Poor feedback is just as important as good feedback in this regard, and you should receive criticisms and negative reviews as valuable opportunities for you to go back to the drawing board and revise your product in order to better meet the needs of your market.

Posted on 15 February 2011

In the online marketing world there are various ways to draw traffic to your website and therefore earn money by promoting products or services. These could be your own creation or various kinds of affiliate offers that you could be running. Article marketing is one of these methods. What exactly does it consist of? Let’s have an overview:

Simply put, article marketing makes you use articles that are related to the niche of whatever you want to promote in order to get traffic to your website. For example if you are promoting a fax to email solution you could write about the advantages of using such a service. They could also be in the form of a review about a certain product or service. Basically, the content will need to make the user want to buy what you are promoting without sounding too much like an advertisement.

Now where do you post these articles? The most common places used by internet marketers to put up their articles are article directories such as Ezinearticles and GoArticles. They have the advantage of receiving a lot of traffic every day and are ranked very high up in search engines such as Google. You could also post them on blogs or other sites which allow users to submit content.

How do articles actually get you traffic? There are two ways actually. The first one is through the links which are found in your article. Depending on where you post them you would be allowed to either insert links in the body of your article or in your signature (also called a resource box). A reader who is interested in finding out more about what you’re talking about can click on the link and then proceed to your website.

Articles can also be used for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. By submitting your articles to high authority websites that are related to your niche and using the keyword that you want to target as your anchor text, you will get some great backlinks to your site. This could increase the position of your site on search engines. Note that building backlinks and doing search engine optimization through article marketing is a process which takes time. Unlike pay per click ads or email marketing, the results will not appear instantly. However it can be well worth it in the end.

Anyone who wants to give article marketing a try will need to know that it is a marketing method that will require some patience and dedication. You will need to write several unique articles and post them online. The traffic will start coming in slowly as more visitors start seeing your articles. But it does have the advantage of being one of the cheapest advertising methods there is. After all, it costs nothing to write the articles and submit them. It simply takes some time. This makes it a perfect solution if you don’t have much of a budget for online advertising.